'Crazy' points fingers about old Nashville

JACKSONVILLE FILM FESTIVAL: Story of great guitar player Hank Garland opens screenings tonight.

Matt Soergel

ORANGE PARK - As the great guitar player Hank Garland lay dying, his brother Billy asked him: What can I do for you after you're gone?

"Go get 'em," Hank said, as pugnacious as ever. "Make 'em pay."

They talked about the movie that might do just that, the movie that would expose the rottenness in old Nashville, the evil that the brothers believe ruined Hank's life.

The movie wasn't close to being finished. And Hank was slipping away. He wasn't worried, though.

"Billy," he said. "I'll watch it from the big screen."

As Billy Garland tells of that day, his eyes shift heavenward. He's a Christian man. And he's sure Hank is up there after laying down the burden of his long life, which flamed so brightly at the start - before the accident, before the electroshock treatments, before decades of obscurity.

Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland died in Orange Park in 2004. He was 74, and it had been 43 years since his career as a Nashville guitar hotshot was cut short by a near-fatal, suspicious car crash.

The movie about him is done; it will play tonight to open the Jacksonville Film Festival.

It'll be a fancy event. The star of Crazy - Waylon Payne, who plays Hank - is expected to come for the Jacksonville showing, and perhaps co-star Ali Larter, too. There will be a red carpet outside the Florida Theatre and a big party afterward, where guitar players, both local and national, will probably talk about Hank and laugh and play his songs.

Billy Garland says he'll be there with his wife, Amy. He wouldn't miss it.

With the movie coming out in just days, he wants to keep the focus on Hank's guitar genius, his cocky humor, his tenacious personality.

"Please uplift Hank," he says, over and over.

But at 71, he's tired and he's bitter, eaten up by what he believes Nashville did to Hank.

Some reputations need damaging, he proclaims, and Crazy - which points fingers at a crooked Nashville music industry - might do that damage.

But ask him if he thinks it's going to have any real effect, and he gives a flat answer.

Crazy is named after the Patsy Cline song on which Hank Garland played lead guitar. That was just one of the dozens of songs he helped turn into hits, back when he was one of the hottest players in Nashville.

The film begins with Garland's arrival in Nashville as a teenager, a baby-faced phenom from tiny Cowpens, S.C. It follows his quick rise to stardom, on stage and in studio. It shows him hanging out with Elvis, Cline, Roy Orbison, Eddy Arnold, Kitty Wells and Hank Williams. It shows him venturing into jazz. It shows his passion for his wife, Evelyn, which led to a marriage that no one says was easy.

It shows how Hank - cocky and bull-headed - rubbed the rulers of Nashville (a fictionalized bunch) the wrong way, threatening a way of doing business that had made them powerful and rich.

And it shows a version of the story that Billy Garland tells: How the 1961 car crash that ended Hank's career was no accident but rather a deliberate attempt on his life. How the electroshock treatment he got after the accident left him, as Billy says, "like a 2-year-old."

Billy believes the whole thing was rotten: He says one witness heard gunshots in the area, while a trucker said he saw a rifle near the crash. The film, by contrast, shows a car deliberately pushing Hank's vehicle off the side the road and two shadowy men pausing to look at the damage they caused.

It took Hank years to regain some of his mental and guitar playing abilities, yet he was never the same, Billy says.

Filmmaker Rick Bieber, an avid guitarist, says he was drawn to Garland's story by the drama of his rise and fall - and because he's a huge fan of Garland's playing.

Garland wasn't widely known by the general public, but for the guitar cognoscenti, he remained legendary (Guitar Player magazine named him one of the top 30 influential guitarists ever). That attracted rock star Steve Vai and one-time Guitar Center executive Ray Scherr to the independent film as producers.

Bieber, Vai and Scherr visited the bedridden Garland in Orange Park in 2004, taping a long interview on which they based much of Crazy (which the filmmakers say is "inspired" by a real story).

"His recollections of the '40s and '50s were great," Bieber says. "It was really the more recent memories that were somewhat more difficult for him to discern."

Crazy stays close to the historical facts of Garland's life, but Bieber says that as a filmmaker he had to fill in some of the blanks - especially when it came to the stormy relationship between Garland and his wife, Evelyn. She died in a car accident a few years after her husband.

"I'm not making a documentary," he says. "There's no way to confirm much of the story and relationships, other than what I was able to take away from my hours and hours of research."

Billy Garland, who's already seen the film, says he's glad Crazy was made. And it's odd, he notes, to see an actor playing yourself on the screen. In the film, as in life, Billy was a big presence in Hank's career.

Still, as a fierce protector of his brother's legacy, he has some complaints: "It doesn't touch nothing what we was really like." Hank, he says, was far more complex than any movie could portray.

Amy Garland is more conciliatory.

"They can't put everything in 104 minutes, but it touches on the big issues," she says. "We cried. A lot. It was very emotional."

'The greatest guitar player'

Later, the Garlands leave the house they shared with Hank and head to Jacksonville Memory Gardens, where he's buried. The gravestone has a picture of one of Hank's famous guitars, along with an epitaph that proclaims him "the greatest guitar player that ever walked planet Earth."

They visit it often. The grave of Billy's son, Billy Jr., is next to it under a banner of his beloved Florida State Seminoles. He died at age 35, collapsing in his father's arms. There's also a patch of grass under which Billy and Amy will lie when their time comes.

These days, they spend much of their time promoting Hank Garland's legacy, running a Web site (hankgarland.com) that's visited by fans from around the world.

The movie, they agree, will at least get Hank's story out there for anyone to see.

"There's no more secrets," Billy says, kneeling by his brother's gravestone. "That's the main thing."